One Way to Spend Your Summer…

Today after I got home from school, my mom was on her computer doing stuff for the Stock Market. Now my mom always does this, the market is essentially a second job for her. Whenever you go in there and she’s working, you can usually find her watching C.N.B.C. Today on C.N.B.C., they were showing an interview with George Hotz, a 17-year old teenager from New Jersey who will be going to college this tomorrow. His summer is now nearly over, but he didn’t waste it.

When the new iPhone was released this summer, Hotz one was one of the many people who bought the phone. However, some things that may not be known about the phone is that 1.) It’s available only in the U.S. because 2.) The only service network for the phone is AT&T. There are a total of 2 networks that could be used wih the iPhone though-AT&T and T-Mobile.

What happened was he had the iPhone but he would have to change networks to work with the new phone of his. Hotz didn’t like this and decided to take it upon himself to unlock or hack the iPhone so that he could change the network of it. He spent an estimated 500 hours working on how to change it without actually doing any damage to the $540+ phone. In the end, he managed to figure it out. As it turns out, this is not at all illegal because currently in the United States, there is no law that says you cannot do this.

For Apple (the company that created the iPhone), this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, in fact, more people have actually started buying the iPhone and their sales increased. For AT&T, well, lets just say that they are not at all as thrilled about this discovery, they’re more along the lines of ticked off at him.